Parsing json and searching through it

Question

I have this code

import json
from pprint import pprint
json_data=open('bookmarks.json')
jdata = json.load(json_data)
pprint (jdata)
json_data.close()

How can I search through it for u'uri': u'http:?

Answer 1

As json.loads simply returns a dict, you can use the operators that apply to dicts:

>>> jdata = json.load('{"uri": "http:", "foo", "bar"}')
>>> 'uri' in jdata       # Check if 'uri' is in jdata's keys
True
>>> jdata['uri']         # Will return the value belonging to the key 'uri'
u'http:'

Edit: to give an idea regarding how to loop through the data, consider the following example:

>>> import json
>>> jdata = json.loads(open ('bookmarks.json').read())
>>> for c in jdata['children'][0]['children']:
...     print 'Title: {}, URI: {}'.format(c.get('title', 'No title'),
                                          c.get('uri', 'No uri'))
...
Title: Recently Bookmarked, URI: place:folder=BOOKMARKS_MENU(...)
Title: Recent Tags, URI: place:sort=14&type=6&maxResults=10&queryType=1
Title: , URI: No uri
Title: Mozilla Firefox, URI: No uri

Inspecting the jdata data structure will allow you to navigate it as you wish. The pprint call you already have is a good starting point for this.

Edit2: Another attempt. This gets the file you mentioned in a list of dictionaries. With this, I think you should be able to adapt it to your needs.

>>> def build_structure(data, d=[]):
...     if 'children' in data:
...         for c in data['children']:
...             d.append({'title': c.get('title', 'No title'),
...                                      'uri': c.get('uri', None)})
...             build_structure(c, d)
...     return d
...
>>> pprint.pprint(build_structure(jdata))
[{'title': u'Bookmarks Menu', 'uri': None},
 {'title': u'Recently Bookmarked',
  'uri':   u'place:folder=BOOKMARKS_MENU&folder=UNFILED_BOOKMARKS&(...)'},
 {'title': u'Recent Tags',
  'uri':   u'place:sort=14&type=6&maxResults=10&queryType=1'},
 {'title': u'', 'uri': None},
 {'title': u'Mozilla Firefox', 'uri': None},
 {'title': u'Help and Tutorials',
  'uri':   u'http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/help/'},
 (...)
}]

To then "search through it for u'uri': u'http:'", do something like this:

for c in build_structure(jdata):
    if c['uri'].startswith('http:'):
        print 'Started with http'